Noida and Ghaziabad residents experienced erratic unscheduled power cuts for around eight hours on Wednesday. Power distribution companies claimed shortage of power supply from Lucknow.

The power department of Ghaziabad claimed it was doing its best to provide uninterrupted supply. But as long as they do not get their power from Lucknow, they are helpless, they said.

The shortage of power has been attributed to poor rainfall this monsoon that has resulted in an increased power demand in rural areas.

“Unscheduled and long power cuts have become a daily affair. In fact, instead of any improvement, the situation has gone from bad to worse in the last few years,” said Rahul Rastogi, a resident of Vaishali.

In Noida, residents are frustrated by outages ranging from four to six hours a day. They claim whenever a power failure occurs, the electricity department tells them that it has happened due to faults in a line or a transformer.

“The power supply is erratic in our sector. Recently, there was no electricity from evening until morning. We have been facing this problem from the beginning of summer. It is becoming difficult to live in this hot and humid weather,” said Rajendra Shukla, a representative of the sector 12 residents’ welfare association (RWA).

Shukla along with other RWA representatives met Arvind Rajvedi, a superintending engineer who works for Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation Limited (UPPCL), to discuss the July 14 outage.

Residents complained that there was rarely anyone to respond to their calls to Rajvedi’s department but added that the latter assured to resolve this problem as early as possible.